On the jacket of Jack White: Collected Lyrics & Selected Writing Volume 1, the poet and critic Hanif Abdurraqib writes: “I wish I read more people who talked about Jack White as a writer of lyrics.” He makes a good point. White is celebrated as a singer, guitarist, producer and generator of indelible riffs but not so much as a wordsmith. His new book, edited by official archivist Ben Blackwell, sets the record straight. Following 2023’s The White Stripes Complete Lyrics 1997-2007, it covers every song White has written outside that band, along with several poems, Instagram ruminations and scans from his notebooks.
White, 50, thinks fast and talks fast. He’s sitting in the Nashville headquarters of Third Man, a record label, recording studio, pressing plant, publishing house, shop and ever-expanding vessel for White’s vision of what is worth valuing and preserving in American culture. He’s a kind of historian of American vernacular, drawn to the relationship between pop and the avant garde, between maverick auteurs and the communal imagination. His own work proves that defiant eccentricity is no obstacle to stadium shows and Bond themes, and that being wildly prolific hasn’t diminished his mystique. With this book, he turns his curatorial eye on himself.
